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The Viking Sword That Shouldn't Exist: The Ulfberht Mystery | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Sleepless History.
0:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you're here.
0:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to travel back more than a thousand years to the long cold coastlines of Scandinavia to the busy river towns of the Frankish kingdoms.
0:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and down the slow-brown rivers of the east toward the markets of the Caspian Sea and beyond.
0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to talk about swords, not just any swords, but a particular family of blades that has puzzled historians, archaeologists, and metallurgists for well over a century.
0:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They are known as the Ulfbert swords.
0:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Along the length of each blade, set into the metal itself is a name.
0:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It reads, more or less, off-burt.
0:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of these swords were made from a kind of steel, so clean and so rich in carbon, that by the usual telling of history, it should not have been produced or used in Northern Europe for another 800 years or so.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: and, as if that were not strange enough, alongside the genuine swords, there are copies, imitations, blades made from ordinary, lesser iron, carrying the same famous name, but sometimes with the letters in the wrong order, or a letter missing, or a small cross in the wrong place, medieval counterfits you might say, given away by their spelling.
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So tonight's story is really three stories woven together.
1:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a story about fire and metal, about how iron becomes steel, and why that matters so much for a sword.
1:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a story about trade, about silver coins and riverboats, and the long routes that tied the Viking world to the far east.
1:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is a story about forgery, about reputation,
1:57
[SPEAKER_00]: and about the very old habit of borrowing a famous name.
2:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you enjoy these long quiet journeys through the past, please consider subscribing to sleepless history and leave a comment letting me know where you're listening from or what you'd like to drift off to next time.
2:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It genuinely helps the show, and I read everyone.
2:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent, with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
2:33
[SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine,
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes, early access, add free listening, and your favorite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there.
2:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay.
2:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate each and every one of you listening.
3:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, a name written in iron.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine a sword lying in the ground.
3:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been there for a very long time, perhaps it was placed in a grave, beside a man who was buried with his weapons, his tools, and perhaps a horse, somewhere in the hills of western Norway.
3:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps it was dropped into a river, whether by accident or as some kind of offering, and it has rested in the silt ever since, with the water flowing quietly over it.
3:43
[SPEAKER_00]: year after year, century after century.
3:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The wooden grip has long since rotted away.
3:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The leather of the scabbard is gone.
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The iron has rusted and in places it has swollen and flaked so that the blade looks less like a weapon and more like a long brown crusted stick.
4:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But underneath that rust, if the conditions have been kind, there is still something of the original metal and set into
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Running down the shallow groove along the center of the blade, there are letters.
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The groove along the center of a sword blade is called a fuller.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: For a long time, people called it a blood groove.
4:25
[SPEAKER_00]: but that name is misleading.
4:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The fuller exists to make the blade lighter without making it much weaker, a little like the shape of a steel beam in a building.
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It removes metal where it is least needed.
4:40
[SPEAKER_00]: On many sorts of the Viking Age, the fuller is broad and shallow, running most of the length of the blade.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the swords we are talking about tonight,
4:50
[SPEAKER_00]: it is in that fuller near the hilt that the name appears.
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The inscription is usually written in capital letters in the Latin alphabet, the alphabet of the church and of the Frankish world rather than in the rooms that Scandinavians used for their own writing.
5:08
[SPEAKER_00]: On the finest examples, it reads something like this, a small cross and then the letters V, L, F, B, E, R, H. Then another small cross and then a final T. In the Latin writing of the time,
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The letter V often stood for the sound we would write as you, so the name is read as Ulfbert.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Ulfber is a personal name.
5:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It belongs to the family of old Germanic names that were common among the Franks, the people who ruled much of what is now France, Germany, the low countries, and parts of Italy in the early Middle Ages.
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It is made of two parts, the first part of is related to our word wolf.
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The second part, bird, means something like bright or shining or famous.
6:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So you might translate it loosely as bright wolf or famous wolf.
6:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the kind of name a warrior might be proud to carry.
6:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is also the kind of name an ordinary craftsman might have had.
6:17
[SPEAKER_00]: because names like this were simply names given to children in the ordinary way.
6:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The small crosses are interesting too.
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: In the writing of the period, a cross placed before a name or a word often carried a religious meaning, a kind of blessing or invocation.
6:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You see crosses like this on charters and on coins.
6:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Their appearance on these blades is one of several small clues that the name and perhaps
6:46
[SPEAKER_00]: came out of a Christian, Frankish setting, rather than from the pagan north where so many of them were eventually found.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: How many of these swords are there?
6:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The number shifts a little, as new finds are made, and old ones are re-examined.
7:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But scholars usually speak of roughly 170 known examples.
7:07
[SPEAKER_00]: That is not a large number.
7:09
[SPEAKER_00]: when you consider that the Viking age lasted for roughly three centuries, and that swords were made in their many thousands across Europe.
7:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is a remarkable number for a single name on a single kind of object.
7:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Much of the careful work of cataloging these swords was done by the Norwegian archaeologist Anne Stahlsberg, who spent years gathering records of Ulfberg blades from museums and collections across Europe.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: What she and others found is that the swords are spread across a very wide area.
7:45
[SPEAKER_00]: A large share of them come from Norway.
7:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Others come from Sweden, from Finland, from the lands around the Baltic Sea, from what is now Russia and Ukraine, and from Germany, including some pulled from the great rivers of the Rhineland.
8:01
[SPEAKER_00]: A few have turned up elsewhere, scattered across the old Viking world.
8:06
[SPEAKER_00]: This distribution is part of the puzzle.
8:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The name is Frankish.
8:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The letters are Latin.
8:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The crosses are Christian.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, the swords are found for the most part in the north and the east.
8:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In places that were for much of this period,
8:27
[SPEAKER_00]: outside the frankish realm and often in the graves of people who are not Christian at all.
8:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The swords themselves span a long stretch of time.
8:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The earliest are generally dated to around the early 800s, the 9th century and they continue to appear into the 10th century, the 11th century.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a span of perhaps 200 years and possibly more.
8:54
[SPEAKER_00]: no single blacksmith lives and works for two centuries.
8:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So from fairly early on, historians began to suspect that Ulfberg was not simply one man hammering away at one anvil.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It was more likely a workshop, or a tradition, or what we might today call a brand.
9:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps there was once a real smith named Ulfberg, and his name became attached to a workshop
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: perhaps the name belonged to the owner or overseer of a workshop rather than the person who actually swung the hammer.
9:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps it was attached to a monastery since monasteries in this period were centres of craft and production as well as prayer.
9:40
[SPEAKER_00]: we do not know.
9:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The man himself, if he ever existed as one man, has vanished completely from the written record.
9:48
[SPEAKER_00]: All that remains is his name, written in iron, again and again.
9:53
[SPEAKER_00]: To understand why these swords mattered, it helps to picture the world they were made for.
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The Viking Age is usually said to begin around the end of the 700s, the late 8th century.
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: When Raiders from Scandinavia first struck at the monasteries and coastal settlements of Britain and Ireland.
10:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following decades, Scandinavian sailors, traders, raiders and settlers spread in many directions.
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They sailed south along the coasts of the Frankish kingdoms and up the rivers into the heart of those kingdoms, reaching Paris more than once, and they travelled east across the Baltic Sea and along the great rivers of what is now Russia, down toward the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and to the wealthy cities of Byzantium and the Islamic world.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: For most ordinary fighting men, the more common weapons were the spear and the axe.
11:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They were cheaper to make and easier to use.
11:09
[SPEAKER_00]: A sword by contrast required a great deal of good metal and a great deal of skilled labour.
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It was expensive, it was a symbol of status, of wealth and of a certain kind of identity.
11:24
[SPEAKER_00]: A sword might be passed down through a family, given as a gift between a lord and his follower, or buried with its owner as a sign of who he had been.
11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The value of a sword can be glimpsed in the old lore codes of the Franks.
11:39
[SPEAKER_00]: One of these, the lore code of the ripuarian Franks.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Set out the prices of various goods for the purpose of paying fines and compensation.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It valued a sword together with its scabbard at seven solidy, the gold coins of the period.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: That was more than the value of a cow and a substantial sum for an ordinary farmer.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: A sword was not something most people could simply go out and buy.
12:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And among swords, some were better than others.
12:11
[SPEAKER_00]: a sword that bent in battle, or snapped, or lost its edge after a few blows, could cost its owner his life.
12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: A sword that held its edge, that flexed and sprang back, that did not shatter in the cold of a northern winter, was worth a great deal more.
12:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The name on the blade then may have been a kind of promise, a mark of quality.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: A signal that this
12:40
[SPEAKER_00]: but a sword from a maker whose work could be trusted.
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing on how unusual that is.
12:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Most objects from the early Middle Ages carry no names at all.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Pots, tools, broaches, and weapons were made in their thousands by people whose names we will never know.
13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: When a name does appear, it is a deliberate choice.
13:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone wanted this blade to be recognized.
13:10
[SPEAKER_00]: someone wanted the people who saw it and perhaps the people who bought it to know where it came from.
13:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The Elfbert blades were not the only swords to carry names.
13:21
[SPEAKER_00]: There are other inscribed blades from the same period, with names like Ingle Rye and others.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: along with blades that bear only patterns or crosses or strings of letters that seem to have no meaning at all.
13:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But Uffbert is by far the most common name and the most famous.
13:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in its day, something like a household name among those who cared about swords.
13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The hilt's on these swords often tell a slightly different story than the blades.
13:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In many cases, the guard, the grip and the pommel appear to be of Scandinavian style, decorated in ways that fit the fashions of the north.
14:08
[SPEAKER_00]: This suggests
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: that the blades were often made in one place and fitted with their hills in another.
14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: A blade might travel north as a trade good, a bare length of steel, and then be finished by a local craftsman to suit the taste of its new owner.
14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So the sword as a whole might be a joining of two worlds, a frankish blade with a frankish name in a Norse Hilt carried by a Norse warrior.
14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: For a long time, the Ulfbert swords were studied mainly by archaeologists and weapons historians who were interested in their shapes.
14:47
[SPEAKER_00]: their hilts, their inscriptions, and the places where they were found.
14:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But in more recent decades, a new kind of question began to be asked.
14:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just where were these swords found, or what do they look like, but what do they actually made of?
15:04
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the metal inside them?
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And the answer to that question turned out to be far stranger than anyone expected.
15:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to spend a little time in the smithy beside the fire, and think about iron and carbon and heat.
15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's do that now, slowly and gently in the next part of our story.
15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, fire, iron and carbon.
15:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin with a simple question.
15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: What is steel?
15:40
[SPEAKER_00]: At its heart, steel is iron.
15:43
[SPEAKER_00]: with a small amount of carbon mixed into it.
15:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a great deal.
15:48
[SPEAKER_00]: In most deals, the carbon makes up well under 2% of the metal by weight and often much less than 1%.
15:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But that small amount makes an enormous difference.
16:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Pure iron is fairly soft.
16:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It bends easily and does not hold a sharp edge for long.
16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Add a little carbon, and the metal becomes harder and stronger.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Add a little more and treat it properly with heat and cooling, and it can become very hard indeed, hard enough to hold a keen cutting edge.
16:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a balance to be struck.
16:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Two little carbon and the blade is soft and bends.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Two much carbon.
16:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and the metal becomes brittle like cast iron and can crack or shatter under a sharp blow.
16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: For a sword, you want something in between.
16:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You want a blade that is hard enough to keep its edge, but tough enough to flex without breaking.
16:48
[SPEAKER_00]: and you want the carbon spread evenly through the metal, rather than gathered in patches, so that the blade behaves the same way along its whole length.
16:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There is one more thing that matters, and that is cleanliness.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: When iron is made from ore, it tends to carry with it, bits of glassy waste material called slag.
17:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Slag is made mostly of the stony parts of the ore and the ash of the fuel, melted together into a kind of dark glass.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: If slag is left inside the finished metal, it forms tiny streaks and pockets.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These are weak points.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: When the blade is struck, cracks can begin at these little inclusions and spread outward.
17:38
[SPEAKER_00]: A sword with a lot of slag in it is a sword more likely to fail at the worst possible moment.
17:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So the ideal sword steel is one with the right amount of carbon, spread evenly, and as little slag as possible.
17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: That sounds simple enough, but achieving it with the tools and fires available in the early middle ages was anything but simple.
18:02
[SPEAKER_00]: In Europe at this time, Ion was made using what is called a bloomerie.
18:08
[SPEAKER_00]: A bloomerie is a kind of furnace, usually a small chimney-like structure of clay or stone.
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps a little taller than a person's waist or sometimes taller.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smelter would fill it with charcoal and set it burning.
18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And then feed in iron ore, often in the form of bog iron, a rusty ore that forms in wetlands and was common across northern Europe.
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Air would be forced into the base of the furnace with bellows, pumped by hand or by foot, hour after hour to keep the fire hot.
18:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside the furnace, the charcoal burned and gave off gases that drew the oxygen out of the ore, leaving behind iron.
18:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But here is the important part.
18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: A bloomary does not get hot enough to melt iron completely.
18:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Pure iron melts at a very high temperature, around 1,500 degrees Celsius, and the bloomary generally worked well below that.
19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of a pool of liquid metal, the smelter was left with a spongy, glowing lump of iron mixed with slag and bits of charcoal.
19:18
[SPEAKER_00]: This lump is called a bloom, which is where the bloomary gets its name.
19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The bloom was a messy thing.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be pulled from the furnace while still hot, and then hammered, reheated, and hammered again, over and over.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: To squeeze out as much of the slag as possible, and to consolidate the iron into a solid bar.
19:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Even after all that work, some slag always remained, stretched into long thin threads within the metal.
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And the carbon content of the bloom was uneven.
19:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Some parts might be almost pure, soft iron.
19:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Other parts might have picked up a good deal of carbon and become quite steely.
20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: A skilled smith could learn to tell the difference, by the way the metal sparked, or
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: but controlling it precisely was very hard.
20:16
[SPEAKER_00]: For centuries, European Smith's dealt with this problem in a clever way.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They made what are called pattern welded blades.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In pattern welding, the Smith takes several bars of iron and steel with different qualities, twists them, stacks them, and forge welds them together, hammering them at high heat until they fuse into a single piece.
20:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The result is a blade with a core made of many layers and twists, which could be combined with harder steel edges welded on along the sides.
20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Pat and welding had several benefits.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: By combining different pieces of metal, the Smith could balance out the uneven qualities of the bloomary iron.
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the finished blade was polished and lightly edged, the different layers showed up as beautiful swirling patterns, like ripples on water or the grain of wood, or sometimes like chains of little herring bone shapes running down the blade.
21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: These patterns were admired for their beauty, and in old poetry, swords are sometimes described with words that seem to refer to these snake-like or wave-like markings.
21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: but pattern welding was slow and laborious, and by the late 800's and into the 900's, it was beginning to fall out of fashion for sword blades.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Smith's were increasingly able to produce blades of more uniform steel, made from better refined, more consistent metal.
21:49
[SPEAKER_00]: These newer blades did not have the swirling patterns.
21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they were plain, grey and even, and they were often lighter with a more tapered shape that balance better in their hand.
22:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ulfberg swords belong to this newer generation.
22:06
[SPEAKER_00]: They are for the most part.
22:08
[SPEAKER_00]: not pattern welded blades, but blades made of more homogeneous steel.
22:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The letters of the inscription, though, were often made in a way that echoes the old pattern welding craft.
22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smith would cut or chisel shallow grooves into the fuller in the shape of the letters.
22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And then lay into those grooves thin rods of iron, sometimes twisted or patented and hammered them in at welding heat, so that they fused with the blade.
22:39
[SPEAKER_00]: When the blade was polished and etched, the in-lade letters would show up as a slightly different colour or texture from the surrounding steel.
22:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It was delicate, careful work.
22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: and it required the Smith to know exactly what he was doing and exactly what the letters should look like.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we come to the part of the story that brought the Ulfberg swords to a much wider audience.
23:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In the late 20th century and the early 2000s, a British Archaeometallurgist named Alan Williams began a long study of medieval swords.
23:16
[SPEAKER_00]: An archaeometallurgist is someone who studies the metals of the past, how they were made, what they are made of, and what that can tell us about the people who made them.
23:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Williams worked with the Wallace Collection in London, a great museum of arms and armour, among many other things.
23:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the years he examined a very large number of European swords, taking tiny samples from them and studying those samples under the microscope.
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: This is patient, quiet work.
23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: A small sample of metal is cut from the blade.
23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Usually from a place where it will do the least harm, such as a spot already damaged, or the very edge of a break.
23:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The sample is mounted,
23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: ground flat and polished until it shines like a mirror.
24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it is likely etched with a weak acid, which brings out the structure of the metal.
24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Under the microscope, the metalurgist can see the grains of the iron, the tiny threads and specks of slag and the patterns that tell how much carbon is present and how the metal was heated and cooled.
24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the swords Williams examined were a number of off-per blades, several dozen in all, and what he found in some of them was surprising.
24:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the blades were made of ordinary bloomery steel, a varying quality, just as you might expect.
24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But some of them, the best of them, seemed to be made of something quite different.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The metal in these blades was remarkably clean, with very little slags.
24:51
[SPEAKER_00]: and the carbon content was high.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In some cases around 1% or even a little more and spread fairly evenly through the blade.
24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That combination, a high and even carbon content with very little slag is the signature of steel that has been fully melted and fully melted steel in this period points toward one particular technology.
25:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It points toward crucible steel.
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Crucible steel is made in a very different way from bloomary iron.
25:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of a lump of spongy metal pulled from a furnace, crucible steel is made by placing iron along with a source of carbon such as charcoal or plant matter into a sealed clay pot called a crucible.
25:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The crucible is then heated in a furnace to a temperature high enough
25:45
[SPEAKER_00]: As the iron melts, it absorbs carbon and the slag being lighter.
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: floats to the top and separates from the metal.
25:54
[SPEAKER_00]: When the crucible cools and is broken open, the Smith finds inside it a solid cake or in-gut of steel that is clean, uniform and rich in carbon.
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds simple when described that way, but it is very difficult to do.
26:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The furnace has to
26:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The crucible has to survive that heat without cracking or melting.
26:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The mixture of ingredients has to be just right.
26:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Ingrid, once made, has to be forged with great care.
26:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Because steel with that much carbon can easily crumble or cracking if it is worked at the wrong temperature.
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is the important point.
26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: As far as we know, crucible steel was not being made in Europe in the Viking Age.
26:46
[SPEAKER_00]: the technique was known elsewhere, far to the east.
26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been practiced for many centuries in southern India and Sri Lanka and in central Asia and the lands of Persia.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But in Europe, the large-scale production of crucible steel is usually traced to an Englishman named Benjamin Huntsman, a clockmaker who, around the year 1740,
27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He developed a method for making crucible steel in Sheffield because he wanted better steel for his clock springs.
27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Sheffield went on to become famous for its steel and Huntsman's method became one of the foundations of the modern steel industry.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So if Williams was right.
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Then some of the finest Ulfbert swords made in the 9th and 10th centuries contained a kind of steel that Europeans would not make for themselves until the 1700s.
27:42
[SPEAKER_00]: A gap of something like 8 or 900 years.
27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: How could that be?
27:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Where did that steel come from?
27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: If it was not made in the Frankish lands, then it must have come from somewhere else.
27:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And that question takes us out of the smithy and onto the rivers and into the long, slow world of Viking age trade.
28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's follow that road next.
28:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter three, the road to the east.
28:14
[SPEAKER_00]: When we think of the Vikings, we often picture them sailing west, their long ships cutting through the grey waves of the North Sea towards Britain and Ireland.
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was another direction.
28:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as important, and in some ways, even more important for trade.
28:31
[SPEAKER_00]: that direction was east.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: From the shores of Sweden and from the island of Gottland in the middle of the Baltic Sea, Scandinavian traders sailed east across the water to the coasts of what are now Finland, Estonia and Latvia, and then into the great river systems that stretched south across the wide forests and plains of eastern Europe.
28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The people of these eastern journeys
29:02
[SPEAKER_00]: a name that would eventually give its name to Russia itself.
29:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The river journeys were long and hard.
29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Traders would sail into the Gulf of Finland and then up the River Never to Lake Ladoga, one of the largest lakes in Europe.
29:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Near the southern shore of that lake, stood a trading settlement known today as Stariya Ladoga, which was one of the gateways to the east.
29:28
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, the traders might follow the river Volkov south toward the town that would become Novgorod and then on into a network of rivers and lakes.
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: At certain points, the rivers did not connect.
29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There, the traders had to haul their boats overland, dragging them on rollers or carrying them from one river to the next.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: These overland stretches are called portages.
29:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It was slow, heavy work, and it is one reason why the boats used on the eastern rivers were often smaller and lighter than the great ocean-going ships of the West.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: There were two great routes that the traders followed, one went south.
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: along the river Deneeper, past the settlement that would become Kiev, through dangerous rapids and down to the Black Sea, and from there, across the water to Constantinople, the Great Capital of the Byzantine Empire.
30:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The Scandinavians called that city, Mick Legard, which means something like the Great City.
30:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The other route went southeast along the River Volga.
30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The Volga is the longest river in Europe, and it flows slowly and broadly all the way down to the Caspian Sea, along its course lay important trading centers.
30:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Near the bend of the middle Volga was Volga.
30:55
[SPEAKER_00]: the chief town of the Volga Bulgars.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Further south near the mouth of the river was Itil, the capital of the Carzars, a powerful people who controlled much of the trade in that region.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And beyond the Caspian Sea, lay the lands of the Islamic world, with its great cities, its rich markets, and at its centre, the city of Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, what did the northern traders bring?
31:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The forests of the north were full of animals whose pelts were prized in the warmer south, stable, martin, beaver, fox and squirrels.
31:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They brought amber from the Baltic shores, honey, wax and walrus ivory, and sadly, they also brought people, captives, taken in raids, who were sold as slaves in the markets of the south.
31:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the darker threads of this history, and it should not be forgotten.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And what did they bring back?
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: They brought back silk and spices, glass beads and fine cloth, but above all,
32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: they brought back silver, enormous quantities of silver, in the form of Islamic coins called dirums.
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The dyrum was a thin silver coin, minted in the Islamic world, inscribed with Arabic writing.
32:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it was made of good silver, it was valued not only as money but as metal.
32:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In the north, where there was no coin economy of the same kind, silver was often weighed and coins might be cut into pieces to make up the right amount.
32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Merchants carried small folding scales and sets of little weights for this purpose.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The amount of Islamic silver that reach Scandinavia in the Viking Age is astonishing.
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Archaeologists have found tens of thousands of dirams in halls across the north, especially on the island of Gottland.
32:59
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most famous finds, known as the Spilling's Horde, was discovered on a farm on Gottland in the year 1999.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It contained more than 14,000 coins, most of them islamic deer-hams, along with arm rings and other silver objects.
33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: All together, it weighed about 67 kilograms.
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the largest Viking age silver hordes ever found.
33:27
[SPEAKER_00]: These hordes are a quiet reminder of just how connected the Viking world was.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: A farmer on an island in the Baltic might keep buried in the floor of his outbuilding, silver coins that had been struck in the cities of Central Asia, Persia and Mesopotamia, and that had passed through many hands on their long journey north.
33:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We also have a remarkable written account of the Rus on the Volga.
33:56
[SPEAKER_00]: In the years 1921 and 1922, an envoy named Ahmad Ibn Fadlin, travelled from Baghdad on a diplomatic mission, sent by the Caliph to the King of the Volga Bulgars.
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Along the way, he wrote down what he saw, and among the people he described were the Rus.
34:16
[SPEAKER_00]: the traders from the north who had come down the river to do business.
34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Ibn Fadlin's account is vivid and sometimes unflattering.
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He describes the routes as tall and fair and he describes their customs, their clothing and a funeral that he witnessed in which a chieftain was burned in his ship.
34:36
[SPEAKER_00]: But for our story, one small detail matters most.
34:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote that each of the men carried an axe, a sword, and a knife, and he described their swords as broad and grooved and a frankish type.
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Frankish swords carried by Scandinavian traders on the banks of the Volga, described by an Arab traveler from Baghdad.
35:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a small line in a long account, but it tells us a great deal.
35:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It tells us that swords from the frankish lands were traveling far to the east, and that they were recognized as a particular type, perhaps even a known and valued kind of weapon.
35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's return to our question.
35:21
[SPEAKER_00]: If some of the Ulfbert swords were made from crucible steel, and if crucible steel was not being made in Europe at this time, then where did it come from?
35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The most widely discussed answer is that the steel itself came along the same eastern trade routes.
35:39
[SPEAKER_00]: In Central Asia and the lands around it, crucible steel was being made in the early Middle Ages.
35:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Archaeologists have found evidence of crucible steel production at sites such as Merve in what is now Turkmenistan and at Axiocat in the Fagan Valley of what is now Uzbekistan.
36:01
[SPEAKER_00]: At these sites they have found the broken remains of crucibles along with the waste products of steel making.
36:08
[SPEAKER_00]: There were also long traditions of crucible steel in India and Sri Lanka, where a kind of steel later known in Europe as woops was made and traded widely.
36:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Crucible steel from these regions was famous in the Islamic world.
36:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was used to make the blades that Europeans would later call Damascus swords, with their beautiful, watery patterns on the surface.
36:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The 9th-century Arab philosopher and scholar Al-Kindi wrote a treatise on swords and the different kinds of iron and steel used to make them, and later writers such as the great scholar Al-Beruni, also wrote about steel and its sources.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Steel ingots and blades were traded across long distances and they were valued goods.
36:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So here is the idea.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps, as the roostraders came down the Volga and met the merchants of the Caspian and Central Asian world, some of them acquired crucible steel ingots in exchange for furs or slaves or other goods.
37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps those ingots travel north up the Volga across the portages over the Baltic and eventually west into the hands of Frankish Smiths and perhaps those Smiths working in a skilled workshop.
37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: forged them into swords, and set into those swords, the name, Ulfbert.
37:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a lovely, sweeping idea, a lump of steel melted in a clay pot somewhere in Central Asia, carried by camel and boat and human hands across thousands of kilometers, forged into a blade in the Rhineland, fitted with
37:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and finally buried in a grave in the hills of Norway.
38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of the early medieval world in a single sword, but it is also, it should be said, an idea that is still debated, not every scholar is convinced.
38:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Some point out that the trade routes more often carried finished goods and silver than raw materials like steel and that there is not yet any direct evidence such as a written record or a find of crucible ingots in the Frankish lands to prove that the steel took this path.
38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Others suggest that some of the high carbon, low-slag blades, might have been made by very skilled European Smiths using exceptionally well-refined bloomary steel rather than true crucible steel.
38:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Later studies of other Ulfberg swords have found metal that seems to fit that picture, very good.
38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Carefully worked bloomary steel rather than melted steel,
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the Ulfbert swords may not all be the same.
39:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Some may be made of melted crucible steel from the east.
39:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Others may be made of excellent European steel.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And others, as we will see in the next chapter, may be made of something much less impressive, carrying the famous name without the quality to match it.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: What is clear is that the Viking world was not a closed, isolated place at the edge of the map.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It was part of a vast web of exchange, stretching from the fjords of Norway to the markets of Baghdad and beyond.
39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Goods, silver, ideas, and perhaps steel moved along that web slowly, hand to hand, year after year.
39:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And the swords that bore the name Oofbert were, in one way or another, products of that web.
40:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But where there is a valuable name, and a valuable object, there is always the temptation to make a copy, and that is where our story turns next.
40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4, The Counter-Fitters.
40:19
[SPEAKER_00]: When Alan Williams and other researchers looked closely at the Alphabets swords, they noticed that the blades did not all share the same quality.
40:29
[SPEAKER_00]: some were superb, others were ordinary, and some were, frankly, rather poor.
40:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The poorer blades were made of lower quality iron, with a good deal of slag left in the metal, and an uneven, often low carbon content.
40:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Swords like these would have been softer.
40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They would have been more likely to bend in a hard fight, and less able to hold a sharp edge.
40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: From the outside, with a new polish and a fine hilt, they might have looked much like the good ones.
41:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But in use, the difference would have shown.
41:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the matter of the inscription itself.
41:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember that on many of the finest blades, the name is written with a small cross at the beginning.
41:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the letters V, L, F, B, E, R, H. Then a second small cross, and then the final T. It is an unusual arrangement.
41:27
[SPEAKER_00]: With that second cross tucked in between the H and the T, nobody is quite sure why it is placed there.
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It may have had some meaning to the makers that has since been lost, or it may simply have been a habit of the workshop, a distinctive touch that set their mark apart.
41:45
[SPEAKER_00]: On many of the lower quality blades, though, the inscription is different.
41:50
[SPEAKER_00]: On some, the cross between the H and the T is missing, and instead the name is written straight through
42:03
[SPEAKER_00]: On others, the letters are jumbled.
42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: A letter is left out.
42:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Two letters are swapped so that the ending reads T, H instead of H, T. Letters are drawn backward or upside down or shaped oddly, as though by someone copying shapes they did not fully understand.
42:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Some inscriptions
42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth remembering that in the early Middle Ages, most people could not read or write.
42:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Literacy belonged mainly to the clergy and to a small number of others.
42:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A blacksmith working in a small forge, copying the name from a sword he had seen, may well have had no idea what the letters actually said.
42:54
[SPEAKER_00]: to him, they may simply have been a pattern, a set of shapes that meant quality and value.
43:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a logo does today for someone who cannot read the words beneath it.
43:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He would have done his best to reproduce what he saw.
43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: and sometimes, his best was not quite right.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So the picture that emerges is this.
43:18
[SPEAKER_00]: There were genuine Ulfbert swords made by a skilled workshop or perhaps a small number of related workshops using very good steel and marked carefully with the name in its particular form.
43:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there were imitations
43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: made by other Smiths, perhaps in many different places using ordinary iron and marked with the famous name in an attempt to borrow its reputation.
43:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The imitations were, in a sense, medieval knockoffs.
43:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And in many cases, their spelling gives them a way.
43:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It should be said that the line
44:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Some blades with the unusual spelling are of good quality, some with the more common spelling are poor.
44:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Researchers are careful not to claim that the spelling alone always tells the whole story.
44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But the general pattern that the best deal tends to go with the careful inscription, and the lesser metal tends to go with the altered or garbled one.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: has been noticed often enough that it has become one of the most memorable parts of the Ulfbert's story.
44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would anyone make a counterfeit sword?
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer is the same as it has always been, because the real thing was valuable and hard to get.
44:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And the real thing may have been even harder to get than you might think.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Because in the Frankish kingdoms, selling weapons to outsiders was often forbidden.
44:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In the year 805, the Emperor Charlemagne issued a set of instructions known as the Capitulary of Thyonville.
45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Among its provisions, it forbade merchants from selling weapons and armor to the Slaves and the Avars, peoples who live to the east of the Frankish realm.
45:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It named a list of border trading places where merchants were permitted to do business, and it placed officials there to watch over the trade.
45:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The concern was clear enough.
45:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The francs did not want their best weapons ending up in the hands of peoples they might one day have to fight.
45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Later in the 9th century, as Viking raids grew worse and worse.
45:42
[SPEAKER_00]: the concern turned to the north.
45:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In the year 864, Charles the Bound,
45:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The grandson of Charlemagne and King of the Western Franks issued an edict at a place called Petres near the River Sen.
45:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Among other things, it forbade anyone from giving or selling weapons, armor, or horses to the Northman as the Vikings were called.
46:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The penalty as the edict is usually summarized was death.
46:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The very existence of these laws tells us something.
46:18
[SPEAKER_00]: you do not forbid a trade unless that trade is happening.
46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Frankish swords were clearly finding their way into the hands of Scandinavians, and of others outside the realm, in numbers large enough to worry kings.
46:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of those swords may have been captured in raids, or taken as plunder.
46:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Some may have been given as gifts, or as payment, or as tribute, but many, surely, were sold.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Quietly, by merchants willing to take the risk for the sake of a good price.
46:50
[SPEAKER_00]: When a good is both highly valued and officially forbidden, its price goes up.
46:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and when its price goes up, the temptation to imitate it grows stronger.
47:01
[SPEAKER_00]: A Smith in the north, all on the borders of the Frankish lands, who could make a sword that looked like an elf bird, and who could set into it the famous name.
47:12
[SPEAKER_00]: might sell it for much more than an ordinary blade.
47:16
[SPEAKER_00]: A buyer who could not read, or who could not examine the steel closely, might never know the difference, at least not until the sword was tested in earnest.
47:26
[SPEAKER_00]: There is something quietly familiar in all of this.
47:30
[SPEAKER_00]: People have been borrowing famous names for a very long time.
47:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In the ancient world, potters sometimes copied the marks of well-known workshops.
47:42
[SPEAKER_00]: In later centuries,
47:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There were forged paintings, forged coins, forged documents, and forged relics.
47:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Today we have counterfeit handbags, counterfeit watches, and counterfeit medicines.
47:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ulfbert imitations belong to that same long tradition.
48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: A name that stands for quality becomes in itself something of value.
48:09
[SPEAKER_00]: and whatever has value, will, sooner or later, be copied.
48:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It is also possible that not every imitation was meant to deceive.
48:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Some Smiths may have thought of the inscription simply as the proper way to decorate a fine sword, a kind of lucky charm or mark of excellence, without any clear idea of a particular maker or workshop behind it.
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Over time, a name can drift from being a signature to being a style.
48:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Much as some brand names today have become ordinary words for the things they once only described.
48:47
[SPEAKER_00]: of birth may have become for some smiths, simply what one wrote on a good sword.
48:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Either way, the result for us is the same.
48:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We are left with a group of swords that all carry the same name, but that very widely in quality, and in the careful study of their metal, and the careful reading of their letters, we can begin to glimpse the different hands that made them.
49:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The master, working with rare and precious steel, and the imitator, doing his best with what he had, and giving himself away with a misplaced cross or a missing letter.
49:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So far, we have followed the swords from the forge to the trade routes to the counterfeit as bench.
49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: but there is one more question to consider.
49:42
[SPEAKER_00]: If some of these blades really were made of crucible steel, how would a smith of that time actually have forged it?
49:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And could a smith today do the same?
49:53
[SPEAKER_00]: For that, we return to the fire one last time.
49:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5, the smith's answer.
50:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early 2010s, the question of the Ulfberg swords reached a much wider audience, thanks in part, to a television documentary made for the American Science Series Nova, called Secrets of the Viking Sword, first shown in the year 2012.
50:23
[SPEAKER_00]: At the centre of that film was a modern blacksmith from Wisconsin named Richard Furr, who had spent many years studying
50:34
[SPEAKER_00]: His challenge was a simple one to state and a very difficult one to carry out.
50:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Could he make an off-burt style sword from crucible steel, using methods that might have been available more than a thousand years ago?
50:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's imagine his workshop for a moment.
50:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a place of shadows and glowing light.
50:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There is the steady roar of the furnace, the smell of charcoal and hot metal, and the sound of the bellows.
51:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Tools hang on the walls, tongs of many shapes, hammers of different weights, files, chisels.
51:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of it all stands the anvil, heavy and dark.
51:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's faced one smooth by years of work.
51:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The first task was to make the steel.
51:22
[SPEAKER_00]: For that, he needed a crucible, a small clay pot able to survive a heat hot enough to melt iron.
51:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Into it went iron, along with materials to supply carbon, such as charcoal and plant matter.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: and substances to help the slag separate from the metal.
51:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The crucible was sealed and placed in a furnace, and the furnace was brought up to an extremely high temperature and held there for a long time, while the contents melted and mixed.
51:53
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the stage where so much can go wrong.
51:56
[SPEAKER_00]: If the furnace is not hot enough,
51:58
[SPEAKER_00]: the iron will not fully melt, and the result will be a lumpy uneven mess.
52:05
[SPEAKER_00]: If the crucible cracks, the precious contents may be lost into the fire, if the proportions are wrong, the steel may end up with two little carbon or far too much, waiting beside the furnace, watching the colour of the flames, listening to the fire, a smith can only
52:28
[SPEAKER_00]: When the crucible was finally cooled and broken open, inside was a small, inget of steel.
52:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not look like much.
52:37
[SPEAKER_00]: A dull, rough little cake of metal.
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps no bigger than a bread roll, but inside it was the potential for a blade.
52:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The second task, forging, was perhaps even harder.
52:52
[SPEAKER_00]: High carbon crucible steel is a demanding material.
52:57
[SPEAKER_00]: If it is heated too much, it can begin to crumble.
53:01
[SPEAKER_00]: If it is worked while too cool, it can crack.
53:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smith has to keep it within a fairly narrow range of temperature.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: and he has to work it slowly and patiently.
53:12
[SPEAKER_00]: A little at a time, drawing it out from a thick cake into a long thin bar, and then shaping that bar into a blade.
53:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It is quiet rhythmic work.
53:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Heat the metal in the fire.
53:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Watch the colour change.
53:29
[SPEAKER_00]: from dark red to cherry to a brighter orange.
53:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Take it out, strike it a few careful blows, turning it on the envelope.
53:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Put it back in the fire before it cools too far.
53:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Heat it again, strike it again, hour after hour, day after day, in the film.
53:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The forging of the blade took a long time, spread across several days, and the Smith described it as one of the most difficult things he had ever made.
54:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came the inlay, grooves were cut into the blade in the shape of the letters.
54:10
[SPEAKER_00]: and thin rods of iron were hammered in and welded into place, just as the medieval smiths had done.
54:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the blade was ground and shaped, hardened by heating, and then quenching in liquid to cool it quickly, and tempered by gentle reheating to take away some of the brittleness.
54:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, it was polished and etched lightly until the letters stood out, faintly, against the steel, the small cross, the letters V, L, F, B, E, R, H, the second small cross, the final T. The finished sword was tested and it performed very well.
54:55
[SPEAKER_00]: it flexed and returned to shape and it held a key edge, whatever the finer points of the debate among scholars.
55:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The project showed that a sort of this kind could be made and that it would indeed be a formidable and remarkable weapon.
55:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It also showed just how much skill, time and effort such a blade demanded.
55:19
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not something that could be turned out quickly or cheaply,
55:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And that, perhaps, is the heart of the matter, whether the best Ulfberg blades were made from crucible steel carried up the vulgar from Central Asia, or from exceptionally fine European steel worked by a Master Smith, or from some combination of the two.
55:43
[SPEAKER_00]: They were extraordinary objects.
55:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They were made by people with deep knowledge and great patience.
55:51
[SPEAKER_00]: At the very limits of what their tools and fires could achieve, it is worth saying clearly that the scholarly debate is not settled and it may never be fully settled.
56:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Some researchers remain convinced that true crucible steel is present in a number of the blades and that it must have come from the east.
56:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Others are more cautious.
56:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Suggesting that the evidence could be explained by very good, very carefully refined bloomary steel, and that the phrase crucible steel should be used carefully.
56:28
[SPEAKER_00]: still others point out that only a portion of the known swords have ever been sampled and studied in detail.
56:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So any conclusion about the whole group has to be held lightly.
56:41
[SPEAKER_00]: New finds, new methods of analysis, and new studies of old swords may shift the picture in the years ahead.
56:50
[SPEAKER_00]: There is also a modern myth that has grown up around these swords.
56:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and it is worth setting gently aside.
56:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes you will hear the Ulfberg described as a kind of impossible object.
57:05
[SPEAKER_00]: A sword so advanced that it seems to have come out of nowhere, a mystery that defies explanation.
57:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But the truth is less mysterious and in its way more interesting, the Ulfberg swords
57:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They came out of a real world, full of real people, smiths, smelters, merchants, sailors, kings, envoys, and warriors.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They came out of forges and furnaces, rivers and portages, markets, and graves.
57:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They are a product of human skill and human connection, not of magic.
57:47
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes them remarkable is not that they are impossible.
57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: but that they show us how much was possible earlier than we might have guessed.
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They remind us that the people of the early Middle Ages were not simple or backward.
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They were capable of astonishing craftsmanship.
58:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They were linked to one another across enormous distances.
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They traded, borrowed, copied and learned.
58:15
[SPEAKER_00]: a lump of steel, or at least the knowledge of how to make good steel, could travel a very long way.
58:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In Europe, the craft of melting steel in a crucible, if it was ever known in the time of the Ulfberg swords, did not take root.
58:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever steel came from the east, if it did, stopped coming, perhaps as the flow of silver, along the eastern rivers slowed toward the end of the
58:45
[SPEAKER_00]: the sword itself changed too.
58:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Blades grew longer and more slender.
58:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Hilts changed shape, and the nightly swords of the high Middle Ages took the place of the swords of the Viking Age.
59:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Inscriptions continued to appear on blades for a while, but the name of birth slowly faded from use.
59:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, many centuries later, in the smoky workshops of Sheffield, in the middle of the 1700s, Benjamin Huntsman began melting steel in clay crucibles to make better springs for his clocks.
59:23
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not thinking of Viking swords.
59:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He had likely never heard of Ulfberg.
59:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But in his furnaces,
59:37
[SPEAKER_00]: that had once perhaps traveled up the Volga in the hands of Rus traders.
59:42
[SPEAKER_00]: 8 or 900 years before.
59:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, the Ulfberg swords rest in museum cases in Oslo, in Helsinki, in Stockholm, in Nuremberg, in London, and in many other places.
59:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They lie on soft cloth under glass, under quiet lights, still brown with rust, still carrying their names.
1:00:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Visitors pass by them and pause, and lean in to read the faint letters in the steel.
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_00]: A small cross, V, L, F, B, E, R, H. Another small cross, and a final T.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere, long ago, a Smith bent over a glowing blade and set those letters into it, one by one, and somewhere else, another Smith, far from the first, copied them as best he could and put a cross in the wrong place.
1:00:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Both of them are gone now, but their work remains, and with that, our story comes to a close.
1:00:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for spending this time with me tonight, and for traveling along the old roads of the Viking world, from the fjords of the north to the rivers of the east, and back again.
1:01:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope that somewhere along the way, the steady rhythm of the story helped you to rest.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Rest well, sleep deeply, and I'll be here again next time.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night.